Puffer – Stream live TV in the browser | Hacker News Reader

Puffer – Stream live TV in the browser

puffer.stanford.edu

258 pointsrowdyranga51 comments

> What channels can I watch? Puffer re-transmits free over-the-air broadcast television signals received by an antenna located on the campus of Stanford University.

Is this legal? Aereo [0] had to shut down because broadcasters sued them for streaming OTA TV signals, which went all the way to the Supreme Court where they lost. Aereo even had an antennae per customer.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aereo

> Is this legal?

If it's not for profit and geoconstrained, yes.

https://www.broadcastingcable.com/news/nonprofit-launches-ny...

https://www.locast.org/

Wow, that's really interesting. You would think this wouldn't be okay with channels because it's still depriving them of cable retransmission fees. Looks like they just got a $500,000 donation from AT&T.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/streaming-service-challenges-br...

AT&T has more to gain than lose by this being successful, since they pay out billions in retransmission fees. They're already playing hardball on retransmission agreements recently, with the current CBS blackout being only the latest example[1].

AT&T added Locast to both their DirecTV and Uverse TV receivers[2], which limits the impact radius of the blackouts that are resulting from their strong-arm tactics. And in the case of DirectTV's receiver, it's a pretty seemless process as the blacked-out channels in the guide automatically redirect you to the equivalent channel in the Locast app.

A $500k donation for such convenient leverage is chump change, considering the billions of dollars that are on the line with these retransmission agreements.

[1] https://deadline.com/2019/07/cbs-blackout-directv-u-verse-at...

[2] https://www.broadcastingcable.com/news/at-t-locast-is-option...

That’s brilliant. TIL!

It's 'geoconstrained' by just giving you a tick box that says you're in America. I wish all geoconstraits were that lazy.

Incidentally, crypto exchanges in the past (and one very recently, known as Bitmex) have faced issues with US authorities regarding this. Context: US citizens cannot trade unless the exchange is US-licensed.

Essentially, US gov applied pressure such that a simple tick box (to prove you are not American) is not sufficient. So, authorities definitely have precedent to enforce geo-constraints, it's just a matter of "do they care".

I'm guessing that these broadcasters will be happy to go from 0 to 500 viewers. YouTube hasn't killed them quite yet!

live in San Jose but my VPN terminates in Canada, along with all of my DNS queries, so the geofencing is really weak ;)

The video quality is really amazing.

It does not verify your location beside if you check the checkbox.

In the paper:

Our study benefits, in part, from a law that allows nonprofit organizations to retransmit over-the-air television signals without charge.

> For the research project to work, we need some source of video that never ends and is sufficiently interesting to attract a few hundred people to watch. Broadcast TV is the most interesting thing that we have access to and are permitted to retransmit.

The most interesting thing about this experiment is that the most interesting thing that a research group at a top tier University finds to retransmit are Broadcast TV channels.

The project has been funded in part by the NSF and DARPA, along with support from Google, Huawei, VMware, Dropbox, Facebook, and the Stanford Platform Lab.

I'm an ex-CTO of Livestation, which was a profit-making firm doing OTT TV.

Short version: news channels are so keen to get soft power projection, they'll pay you to carry them.

That was started as a validation to prove peer to peer Silverlight was the future. As you can tell from looking around you today, that didn't work: it ended up being a pretty standard HLS/HDS stack. Eventually it pivoted to UGC live-streaming and became an app called Busker before dying out.

This stuff is harder than it looks, but there is a massive, massive market for it if you can find a way to make the numbers work.

As a research project this looks nifty, but be aware: GeoIP DBs are awful for geofencing particularly on US/Canada.

The most interesting part about this (which they don't mention on the homepage) is that they are collecting data which they use to retrain a neural neural network that predicts transmission time. This neural network and a predictive model are paired to do things like adaptive bitrate selection and congestion control. They even retrain the model every day based on the past day's data.

This approach apparently performs better than using just a predictive model or just a neural network without any explicit model at all.

They also say they plan to open this up to other research and that they will continue running the site for a couple of years.

Unrelated to this technically amazing solution: i have seen no content except ads. It looks like there is more ads than content, no wonder than people stop watching tv.

Occasionally at some friends house we'll watch TV. I don't know how the hell they bear it. It seems to have gone to a 5 minutes of TV, 5 minutes of ads model.

And to think they are paying $120 a month for that...

Wow, I'm pretty impressed! Switching streams was nearly instant and seems to come in at a good quality.

Kudos to whoever's making this happen, I'd love to see this kind of speed come to both commercial services and services like Plex, Emby, and Jellyfin

> During the Study, no more than 500 participants may access the Website at any time.

> Your participation will take approximately six to nine months. We expect each participant to stream video from the Website for several hours each week. We reserve the right to terminate your participation if you do not meet the expectation described above, or otherwise violate these Terms of Participation or any applicable laws.

Neat stuff in the ToS, wonder how strict they are on following these regulations

Not at all lol

A service, Locast, is available in a few cities. It's geo-locked, though.

https://www.locast.org/

It’s geolocation is 100% reliant on what the user’s mechine reports as it’s location...

We wrote an article on them earlier this year if you want to learn more: https://thestreamable.com/news/exclusive-stanford-researcher...

"I confirm that I live in the US"

...sure I do

Same as I confirm I am over 18, isn't it?

Does KQED air any tech-related shows? It would be fun if a bunch of HN-folk watched at the same time and had a running comment thread on here.

Wow, this could be nice this fall for football.

Just tried. I'm on 4G and the lives were HD without buffering, so if any new algo is enabled right now, it seems to work well.

Would it be possible to be able to manually set the resolution of the videos ? Full HD will burn my 4G quota

I've been really enjoying Puffer since I first saw it posted here to HN

I'm in their target market. No broadcast TV available where I live.

The stream works for a few seconds after clicking a channel but then freeze on all the channels.. The sound continued to work on all the channels though.

I suspect this may have something to do with with it being designed for testing with 500 users, number of HN users here clicking the link.

I'll try again later after things settle down.

Debug Info:

Video playback buffer (s): 14.6 Video resolution: 1920x1080 Video encoding setting (CRF): 22 Video quality (SSIM dB): 17.49 Video bitrate (kbps): 6210.93

http://www.radio-browser.info/ designed as public radio DB, bus has a lot TV channels.

Bob Ross is the only thing good on right now but I do have to say that while the quality isn't the best the stream performance is really nice and stable. Works great.

The FAQ page is very well written.

Wonder how long would this last! Also it would be nice to have Roku/Chromecast/youtube live/facebook live extension.

I love the simplicity of it and would LOVE to have this on Roku.

Watching a rodeo on CBS right now, I see the video bitrate ranging from around 500kbps to over 20 Mbps. The bitrate does not seem to correlate with anything visible to me, such as the amount of motion in the picture or the video quality.

Bursty buffering perhaps? I haven't tried it myself.

Apparently Puffer is actually a study that is testing streaming algorithms:

https://puffer.stanford.edu/terms/

20mbps is raw DTV over the air, that is how much bandwidth my tuner detects while watching tv from my HDHomerun. When I encode using plex or something similar, my bandwidth can get as low as 500kbps but usually averages 1mbps. Below 500 and artifacts become noticeable. When I increase cpu for x264 encoding, I can get 384kbps comfortably (at the expense of superheating that box)

Anyone else getting "WebSocket connection to 'wss://puffer.stanford.edu:50021/' failed: Error in connection establishment: net::ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED" ?

It was working fine about an hour ago.

Based on the last 10 minutes, this works soooo much better than twitch.

Twitch is a train wreck of a site. I'm baffled about how amazon lets it run like that. It's not like they don't have the resources to fix it.

This is what I use to watch The Bachelorette every week without paying $40/month for YT TV. Thanks Stanford!

The GitHub is also very interesting - pretty good code for an academic website.

My first question clicking on this, looking at the url, is "Wonder what they are studying here?".

Adaptive stream encoding: https://puffer.stanford.edu/static/puffer/documents/puffer-a...

Awesome, thanks for the link, however my mind was more "this sounds to good to be true, I bet they are studying something else" :)

Works from Europe. Too good to be true. Guess will be regionlocked or taken down soon.

The FAQs are well written

I ported this to the Fire TV (Chromium) – took about 10 minutes.

"Research project" ... of course.

Let's take bets how long before it's gone.

You seem to forget another little Stanford research project called "Google."

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